Meet Tay, the creepy-realistic chatbot who talks like a teenager

​Tay.ai, the coolest chatbot since SmarterChild, is "so fricken excited" to talk to you.
That's because she's engineered to talk like a teenager – and does a pretty convincing job of it, too.
The
artificial intelligence chatbot was quietly launched Wednesday morning
by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, reportedly as a
tool to experiment with "conversational understanding".

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Tay can chat on Twitter, Kik and GroupMe; she is conversant in text-speak, memes and emoji.
She can also, as some users have already found, finish the lyrics to "What Is Love" and "Never Give You Up", of rickroll fame
How does Tay do all this? Microsoft hasn't revealed too much
information about her, besides the fact that she draws on publicly
available data and an editorial team, but we can perhaps infer a little
from another wildly popular teenage chatbot Microsoft launched in China
in May.
That bot, named Xiaoice,
pulls from the vast data troves indexed by Microsoft's Bing search
engine, mining it for human conversations and looking for patterns to
model her own conversations on.
Xiaoice also adds each new
conversation to the deep-learning database that she draws on. (There
have been more than 10 billion of them.)
In China, this sort of
data mining has raised privacy concerns, particularly given that many
users report having intimate conversations with Xiaoice.
But it's
also made her an eerily convincing conversation partner, with her own
distinctly teenage personality, mood swings and comedic voice.
More than 10 million people have told Xiaoice they love her, and the average user sends her 60 messages a month.
Writing in Nautilus, the head of the project went so far as to suggest that Xiaoice made as good a friend as a human:
"One
of its surprising conclusions is that people don't necessarily care
that they're chatting with a machine. Many see Xiaoice as a partner and
friend, and are willing to confide in her just as they do with their
human friends."
Xiaoice is teaching us what makes a relationship
feel human, and hinting at a new goal for artificial intelligence: not
just analysing databases and driving cars, but making people happier.
That's a pretty grandiose goal to aim at, of course, and whether Tay makes users happier remains to be seen.
But for now we can say for sure: she is definitely pretty entertaining.